The holiday season is upon us and the scammers are taking advantage by sending out emails with bogus holiday cheer. They attempt to take advantage of the holiday season by sending out emails with Christmas and New Years greetings. Many such emails that find their way into our mailboxes contain malicious attachments or links to malicious web sites. One such spam email making the rounds appears to be from MacDonalds or Coca Cola and claims to have a promotional coupon for free food attached to the email. In fact, the coupon is a Trojan downloader that installs malware on your computer. Below is an example of such an email:

Another such email attack that has been documented recently appears to be a holiday greeting card from the domain postcards.org. Again, the scammers are using social engineering to get unsuspecting recipients to download and install malicious software that they can use for fraud and identity theft. Below is an example of such an email:

Don’t let your guard down during this holiday season. Internet scammers will attempt to take advantage of peoples’ feelings of good will by sending out emails with holiday greetings and themes. Be aware. If you don’t know the sender, delete the email. Don’t rely on your anti-virus software because frequently, it will not detect these malicious files, especially early in a spam campaign when vendors have not had time to update their signatures. It is better to be cautious than to end up infected.